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GOOD READING MAY 2016
20
instructional book
An Approved Treatise of
Hawkes and Hawking.
A memoir out this
month by Richard
Hines, No Way But
Gentlenesse, takes its
title from this quote.
Hines’s life was changed
when he stumbled
upon a nest of fledgling
kestrels on the grounds of a medieval manor.
He adopted one of the birds and imaginatively
named it Kes. He taught himself to train the
avian gymnast, using archaic wr itings about
falconry he found in his
local library.
There’s a long
tradition of falconry
being documented
in literature; Helen
Macdonald also explores
much of this written
history in her stunning
2014 memoir, H is for
Hawk. When Helen’s
father died, she channelled
her grief into the
training of a goshawk
called Mabel. Together
Mabel and Helen
became well acquainted
with death. Helen
entered the soaring,
blood-splattered world
of the hawk as they
crashed through brambles
and barbed-wire fences,
hunting rabbits and
pheasants together. In
Helen’s eyes Mabel is
like a reptilian murderess,
a dragon-like myth, a
fallen angel who can fly
between the realms of
the living and the dead.
She’s never descr ibed as
a mere bird.
Also entwined with
the story of Mabel is a
fascinating biography of
T H White, author of The
Sword in the Stone and a
fellow goshawk trainer.
He documents his (fairly
dismal) attempts at falconry
in The Goshawk, and it’s
intriguing to find the
links between this
experience and the
famous odyssey of King
Arthur and Merlin, who
shares his name with
a type of falcon. Keep
an eagle eye out for
Peregrine Spring, a
memoir about peregrine
falcons by legendary bird
wrangler Nancy Cowan.
These raptors can reach
speeds of 322 kilometres
per hour when diving for prey, making them
the fastest creatures on Earth.
Monkey magic
Jane Goodall,
the doyenne of
primatologists, has spent
55 years studying the
social structure and
behavior of chimp troops
and has worked tirelessly
for the conservation of
African forests. When
she began her study of
chimps in Tanzania in
1960, she was completely
untrained as a scientist, yet she began to notice
the nuances and uncanny parallels between the
interactions of chimpanzees and humans that
science had previously dismissed. She viewed
the primates kissing and tickling each other
and saw them using stalks of grass to pull
ter mites out of mounds. These demonstrations
of resourcefulness and toolmaking became
CATEGORICAL